Bill Clinton: “----the successful work that's been done in the empowerment zones by these community development financial institutions.…”

“----the successful work that's been done in the empowerment zones by these community development financial institutions. If you look at the banks that have vigorously pursued the Community Reinvestment Act and what they've been able to achieve, there is a lot of evidence that this will work. Secondly, this is not like either the Great Society of the sixties or the great neglect of the eighties; this is about getting good jobs into the inner cities and the rural areas by building an economic infrastructure that is part of the private economy, where the primary role of the Government is to, through tax incentives and loan guarantees, reduce the relative risk and to provide and to support these intermediary institutions so--like the community development banks and the microenterprise loan programs, where there are relationships with people in the community, so good decisions will, in fact, be made. And there's just a lot of evidence that this works, not just in the United States but all over the world. And what I'm trying to do with this tour is to, building on what we've already done, show the investor community in America and the business community that there are a lot of good opportunities out here in the cities and in the rural areas, and secondly, to try to highlight the need for this new markets legislation which will, unlike the empowerment zones of the community development financial institutions, be nationwide in scope. It will be available to investors in every underdeveloped area in the country whether or not they have a community development bank, whether or not they have an empowerment zone or an oppressed community, whether or not they have any of these other things. And it emphasizes the most important thing, which is incentives to get that first equity capital to start the investment. Essentially, what none of these programs in the past have ever seriously done is to try to build a self-sustaining economic infrastructure. So that's why you see these apparently contradictory numbers. You see wages for the lowest income workers finally going up again substantially over the last 2 years; you see the lowest African- American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded, but you still see these pockets of real difficulty because there is, in these places, no indigenous economy. Mr. Herbert. What do you say to those Americans who are already doing well, especially Republicans? What do you say to them? Why should they get behind an effort like this? Why is it good for them?”